The Irascible Professor
SMIrreverent Commentary
on the State of Education in America Today

by Dr. Mark H. Shapiro

"This
work contains many things which are new and interesting. Unfortunately,
everything that is new is not interesting, and everything which is interesting,
is not new."... ...Lev Landau.

Commentary
of the Day - February 1, 2004: Interesting! Guest commentary
by Sanford Pinsker.

After 40+ years
in the classroom there are certain rituals that accompany retirement.
One is emptying your office so that the person who's had an eye on the
campus view outside your window can, at long last, move in; another
is the sudden realization that your carefully labeled
course syllabi and class notes no longer matter a fig. The list goes
on and on, with every item making it clear that you are yesterday's news.
It's enough to give a person the willies.

That's why I figure
it's high time to give other side of the retirement coin a lighthearted
look. In my case, there's nothing quite so uplifting as a preview
of the "coming attractions" for next year's faculty meetings: a proposal
to bring our Greek system into full college recognition (and oversight);
a plan to replace dormitories with a smaller, more regulated "house" system;
and yet another effort to encourage faculty members to live within
a mile's radius of the campus. None of these issues "grabs me" --
as our students like to put it when asked about any literary work written
before last Wednesday -- and I'm jolly glad I won't have to sit through
the tedious debates that will divide the faculty squarely down the
middle, with one half swearing an allegiance to "long overdo restraint"
while the other half is equally insistent that a good college
governance is the one that governs least -- and the best one of all leaves
plenty of time and space for "dancing around the campus wine cask."

I used to think
that the phrases surrounded by quotation marks were indigenous to
my campus alone but the advent of e-mail has made it abundantly clear that
they flourish at nearly every college that has faculty members and faculty
meetings. Sometimes the rabbit ears are meant to be sneer quotes
-- as in the case when words such as "truth" or "beauty" are being hooted
out of the hall as indicators of the patriarchal hegemony -- but there
are also occasions when quotation marks direct our attention to the latest
news from the heavy-water theorist Jacques Derrida. Either
way, faculty members are more than able to turn any debate into a
clash of quotation marks which operate as shields, as weapons, and sometimes
as both.

I am well rid
of the foolishness I used to hear every two weeks, or more often when the
faculty met in extra sessions to consider what a change in the college's
final exam schedule might mean, especially to those who regularly handed
out "take home: exams" a week or two before the final exam period officially
began. For faculty members deeply suspicious and opposed to more
regulation from the dean's office, the issue boiled down to a clash between
freedom and constraint.

Curiously enough,
certain students echoed the all-purpose sentiment when they used teaching
evaluation forms to hammer a teacher for being "too rigorous" because he
or she handed out a syllabus at the beginning of the semester and then
kept to it. Far better (according to some) were teachers who
were deemed "flexible," which meant that they would often ask the class
what they wanted to do. Most of the time this meant "meeting outside"
or better yet, taking the day off altogether.

All this is easy
enough to kiss farewell. But what is even more attractive is the
prospect of living a long, happy life without ever uttering the word "interesting."
Why so? Because "interesting" is nearly always an empty word, and
when a teacher lets it slip out in a classroom it is nearly always meant
to be a weasel word. The fact is that most of the things that students
say are not interesting. But that said, who wants to turn off discussion
altogether, which is what too much bald truth will do if directed to the
person half nodding in the back row and wearing a baseball cap backwards.
For such a student, publicly declaring that his response to Hawthorn's
story is "interesting" may be a lie, but if so, it is a white lie
meant to encourage not only that student but others within earshot.
Once again, the tension in Hawthorn's The Maypole of Merrymount
are well worth exploring, even from those more prone to identify with the
partygoers than with their more sober, morally serious cousins. It's
"interesting" that this should be the case, but it does not bring us very
far in terms of understanding what the story is finally about. "Interesting"
is the anthem of those who believe that every person is entitled to his
or her opinion, and moreover, that all opinions are right. I will
fight to the death to defend the first part of the equation, but not the
second. Still, I will concede that there are time in the classroom
when the case for widening the circle makes a certain amount of sense.

That's why I used
the word "interesting" far more than I probably should have. In this
crime I am hardly alone. But now that I'm retired, one of the great
liberating joys is that I have no need to use "interesting" ever again
-- unless, of course, when the need really does fit this deliberately vague
word.

I can think
of places, other than classrooms where the word "interesting" is bandied
about (art museums, for example, or recitals for cutting-edge music), but
I always suspect that people are hiding behind the word until they get
a sense of what the majority thinks. After all, you can't get into
too much trouble when hiding behind "interesting." "Lousy" would
have made it clear that you hate the damn thing, and "wonderful" would
have painted you into a corner.

Now that I'm retired
I will, no doubt, have lots of occasions to test out whether I'm using
"interesting" in a legitimate (interesting?) way or whether I'm simply
being much the same coward as most people who hide behind intentionally
vague words. Perhaps it's best that I retire the word "interesting"
altogether; and perhaps that wouldn't be a bad idea for those who still
labor in the teaching vineyard.